I know these things because death allows me to.

Listen, child.  

Desierto de los Muertos will dry Officer Kincaid’s eyes. He will look for you.

Rio Grande will rise to drown him while he searches.

A horse more agile than his SUV along riverbanks will pick up traces, imprints of your hands and knees where you fell, boy. These marks will help him find you.

I know because during the hours my spirit rose to leave Earth, when I was still exhausted from how they butchered my body, I asked for a few more days around you. Gracias a Dios, they were granted, so I stand slightly behind your right shoulder. Your vieja abuelita, a small street fighter on her way to heaven, keeping you company for a time here where Texas thrusts its thumb downward into Mexico. Scrublands all around, niño. Boundaries fluttering in the wind like mourning doves.

You will not see me since I am almost nothing, so listen if you can. I might need to use that voice I used in Guatemala City when I warned you not to touch the tortillas – no toca – baking on a heavy metal disk over our woodfire. Or my nicer voice when I called you away from playing ball in Lomas de Santa Faz’s alley. Among too many dangers. That slum. I want you to hear my K’iche voice also, the one I used when I told you to go to sleep. Remember how I unwound my hair from around my head and pretended to be irritated at holding you in my arms until your eyes closed and your mouth fell open softly? I did not want to spoil you. To say you were my treasure and your mami’s treasure.

After they killed your papi – your mami’s husband, who was my only son, querido – Mami made decisions as you must. Thank God you did not witness what drove her to flee to El Norte. Our neighbor’s four-year-old girl, dumped beheaded in her yard. But now you have seen things as bad as that, hijo, things a five-year-old child should not see. I will be honest with you.

I will fortify your memories of what happened before you reached El Norte, so your child’s mind does not confuse your past, so you can claim it, bit by bit, as you grow older. I will explain things as you endure them, as people around you endure, so you understand what adults do, so you will understand Mami would never agree to abandon you. You must not hate her or hide from her if you are reunited. Against such a twisting of your soul, I will give you a weapon. Other kidnapped children imitate their captors, chico. You must not. If you invent games to mimic ICE agents slapping shackles on your cousins, you will hand your jailers their victory. If you believe cruelty is strength, you will discover holes in your laughter when you are a man.

Escúchame. Hear me, though I am almost nothing. Take up the sword of your story and remember you are more than what they inflict upon you. If remembrance fades, remember me.

Understand though – next time you must invite me to visit. My power already begins to retreat as my soul rises, wavering after hasty burial by neighbors who recovered my scattered limbs. There is little left in the grave to honor with picnics and marigolds on Día de los Muertos, yet I will not haunt anyone. I will not haunt you. Let us simply speak to one another always, mi nieto, as the dead and their loved ones do. Wherever you grow up, on November 1 fly a brilliant barrilete as we used to do for your abuelo, let your kite summon my spirit. Attach a paper message telling me where to descend. Your kite need not be large. Make its colors bright.

 

*     *     *

 

            In the McAllen Border Patrol Station, just across from Tamaulipas state where you and Mami passed near Reynosa, Officer Jordan Kincaid is looking down at spiky black hair that swirls over the crown of your head. He gives Mami forms to sign. Receipts, he says, for your belongings. Safe and a little lifeless, his office’s norteño air conditioning cools the skin on your arms. Border Patrol Officer Kincaid doesn’t have a haircut like yours, chico. His head is shaved. He is tall and bulky from using the Station’s indoor exercise room. His arms are big and his shoulders are muscular. Standing by Mami, you try to decide where his neck starts and stops. You think he might be as old as your abuelo was when he died. Quarenta y cinco. Forty-five. A good man, my husband, though he drank too much.

You don’t realize that as Officer Kincaid looks down at your head, he is not thinking about his strength. He recognizes your haircut is growing out, boy. Still, he wonders how someone managed to attend to your grooming along the migratory route.

 

Where you walked for two months and saw a dead man lying in the road with no head or hands and Mami pushed your face into her thigh so you wouldn’t keep looking. But you kept thinking about him, didn’t you, until Officer Kincaid’s big arms and shaved face put order back together. He has his head, his hands, everything. 

 

Norteños call your kind of haircut a buzzcut, chico. It signifies self-respect in Border Patrol Officer Kincaid’s household, which he wishes to run like a captain. That’s what the even black swirl of your crown makes him think. Then he shifts his gaze, gives Mami a white ballpoint pen stamped with green letters. His Spanish is official gringo. There is no music in it, but it is clear.

“Señora.” He clicks down the ballpoint for Mami and hands over the pen, ready, its point facing away from her, toward him. He seems to you an honorable man, doesn’t he, handing over his weapon correctly. The way Mami once told Papi to hand her the kitchen knife when she was slicing something for you to eat.

I can tell you have stopped hearing noises from this processing center’s hallways. You concentrate, wondering if what Mami is signing might begin your new life in El Norte. You must be attentive and help her with the Anglo you learned from other boys along the route. I can feel you believe this, I can feel your mind shift.

Outside, over Texas’ dry grassy ranches, it is hot, as usual. Within, you begin to feel chilly under your T-shirt, yet you are too cautious to ask Mami for the sweater she brought in her backpack.

 

A backpack she asked you to carry for a few minutes when you were on your way through scrubby trees and stones outside Reynosa, when she had to peepee in bushes over dust because her baby belly was getting bigger. Sometimes on your long journey Mami missed and her jeans smelled of peepee too, until she could soak the spot when you found clean water. Never forget she rinsed herself, and you, as a matter of dignity.

 

As Mami signs something, you notice Officer Kincaid seems more comfortable in the Border Patrol Station’s cool office temperature than he did outdoors. Perspiration does not soak his underwear’s waistband, something you would not know about, though you do catch a smell that slices your nostrils every time he raises his arms. It makes you want to pinch your nose, but you know that is rude. You wonder why he must wear a long-sleeved, dark green shirt and thick vest, probably against bullets. This vest makes him look like the Mutant Ninja Turtle toy you found. Why in this heat? Yet the uniform is powerful. Maybe you want such a uniform someday. When you are a U.S. citizen, you think. Right now, you fear the badge and duckbill cap and insignia “CBP BORDER PATROL Federal Agent” with pockets for a pistol and walkie-talkie and other macho things.

Because you are a smart boy, you have watched Officer Kincaid carefully since he ordered you and Mami to come with him this morning, just before dawn.

 

*     *     *

 

 “Vengan conmigo. Come with me. United States Customs and Border Protection.” You could not see Officer Kincaid speaking from behind his flashlight, a small white sun radiating four streaks, a cross that blinded you. You smelled cool desert shrubs and a hint of water or latrine.

“Asylum, señor,” Mami said into the dark. You didn’t know whether you’d crossed the bridge from Reynosa or not because Mami had carried you sleeping on her back, your legs around her pregnant tummy.

Officer Kincaid looked tired when he placed his flashlight pointing upward on the ground. He shifted his weight onto one strong leg and rested his broad pink hand near his hip, away from his gun. He did not seem to think you were dangerous. His flashlight’s rising beam gleamed across his gold wedding band. With his walkie-talkie, he called a woman Border Patrol officer. “Barbara. I’ve got two. A female, pregnant, late twenties, and an approximately five-year-old male. Possibly her child.”

Cicadas started up within surrounding brush. A whistle duck startled the graying wilderness horizon. Officer Kincaid heard and smiled slightly, though he did not take his eyes off you and Mami.

When Border Patrol agent Barbara Jenkins arrived in a Jeep, she said, “Permiso, señora,” and felt Mami’s body all over. She noticed when Mami’s thighs flinched. You knew that under Mami’s blue jeans lay bruises. You saw the coyote beat Mami on the backs of her thighs day before yesterday because she refused to carry cash into the U.S. You heard him say, “Just this one time, mujer, don’t be a fool, the money is legal, less than $10,000, it’s nothing, we’ll give you a minivan and necessary documents.” Mami had nothing left to lose – only you, my boy – so she escaped the coyote’s group two nights ago, while you were both still alive. She walked alone to save you, rustling the black grass along Texas’ border.

Agent Jenkins then asked permiso to feel your little body all over, even near places where Mami told you not to let people touch you. Officer Kincaid seemed impatient.

He was pressed between time and justice. He ached to go after serious offenders, though he did not say so. He did not tell you and Mami how unimportant he thought you were. He simply said you had broken U.S. law. Mami wanted to argue, almost crying, that she was only seeking asylum, please. You both saw Officer Kincaid getting angry. Mami became quiet. He said U.S. authorities would take charge.

“Come with me. Vengan.” It didn’t sound like “Yes, asylum,” a word you heard every day along the migratory route, and it didn’t sound like no. There was something settled and empty in Officer Kincaid’s words.

He led you and Mami over crackling driveway gravel and into a large building. He locked you both in a room and you fell asleep on Mami’s shoulder for an hour or two.

 

*     *     *

 

That is how you came to be here at the Border Patrol Station, chico. It is still morning when Mami signs receipts in Kincaid’s office and he takes back his pen. He accidentally brushes his hand over your hair. I can tell he is surprised your hair isn’t coarse. It is almost baby hair, he thinks, the color of coal his grandfather once mined further north. Your “little-guy buzzcut,” Officer Kincaid realizes, is as soft as that of another boy he doesn’t want to think about. Soft as the belly hair of the Kincaid family’s mongrel puppy, in that crease of her groin when she opens up for comfort, trusting them.

There are ten other migrants waiting outside the door when Officer Kincaid apologizes to Mami, asking her to stand at a white wall near a desk where another man is making phone calls. Officer Kincaid asks Mami to pose sideways before a chart with lines to measure height and to look at him while he aims a camera. Mami’s tummy shows a lot. Her long hair down her back, she turns toward the camera and you understand, “My mother is beautiful.”

Officer Kincaid has water in his eyes. You don’t know he is thinking about that other boy. There is a noise of many voices speaking Spanish in the hallway. He opens two file folders and puts Mami’s photo inside one of them.

“Mami, tengo frío,” you say, and because you feel cold, she moves away from the chart on the white wall to open her backpack and look for your sweater. She can’t find it.

 “I’ve got a call from Lenhardt’s ranch. Some of his cattle are missing,” the man at the desk with the phone says to Officer Kincaid.

“How does he know?” Kincaid asks.

“Implanted chips last year. Or ear tags. Tracking devices. He usually knows where they are. Two aren’t beeping in.”

“That goes to someone else.”

“He suspects it was an illegal. Found his outside tap open and running.”

“No. That goes to someone else. We’re busy here,” Officer Kincaid says closing your folder and Mami’s. You are disappointed by his poor sophistication. He doesn’t use tracking devices for you, as Lenhardt does with cattle. Kincaid even forgets to photograph you. Perhaps it is unnecessary, since you and Mami are traveling together, as a familia.

He forgets details because he is thinking about a speeding ticket he let go once. He did this more than once in his previous job as a police officer, which returns to his mind when he takes Mami’s photo in McAllen. When he sees how beautiful she is and how young and how she dared pierce morning darkness with her claim of asylum. He glances at you. By now he thinks of you as “little buzzcut.” “Catch and release, little buzzcut,” he might say to you yet does not. “Official discretion,” Officer Kincaid might say.

 

The traffic stop he recalls from those years ago was a gringo woman, about sixty. He told himself speeding is a minor crime in the U.S. after all, and because he recognized her from church, he issued a warning rather than a ticket. He remembers how he told her to have a nice day.

            He still sees this lady at church since she is a friend of his mother’s. Even now Kincaid feels annoyed that she wears sunglasses over half her face. He dislikes the tiny diamond cross she still wears on a gold chain around her neck, which shows wrinkles under her suntan. Her breasts are pushed up into a pink blouse over white jeans. Skinny arms. In his opinion, her haunches resemble little bags of rice. What he remembers most sharply is that this woman believes immigrants are criminals, like the M-13 gang reported by news announcers.

 

Child, as he puts your folder on one desk and Mami’s on another, Officer Kincaid surprises himself. He regrets that he never reminded the diamond cross lady about her second chance after she broke the speed limit by eleven miles an hour. He notices Mami doesn’t have a cross around her neck and he assumes your coyote took it when her money ran out. He is right.

            Now that forms are signed, he takes Mami by her elbow and shows her to a doorway in his office’s white wall. The doorway has metal framing around it, painted almost the color of wood at your papi’s store in Lomas de Santa Faz. Surfaces here are harder than wood, though. They are metal. Everything is neat, not soft. Black computer screens match high-backed official chairs. The cool temperature indoors is good for equipment and manly chairs and you want one of those someday for your own negocios.

Mami lifts her backpack to move toward the doorway then says, “Espera,” then in Anglo, “Wait” to Officer Kincaid. She has found your sweater and pulls it out. Bending over hurts her. She tells you, “Vente, vente rápido,” and holds the sweater out. She expects you to hurry so you can walk through the doorway together with her.

 

As you walked together those many days away from Guatemala City to La 72 shelter. It was a refuge among Tenosique’s green rivers in Tabasco state, just across the Guatemalan border into Mexico. La 72, welcoming and colorful, clean, food, computers, telephones, everyone helped with cleaning, Fray Tomás’ stopping place for thousands who must walk toward asylum. You wanted to stay, you told Mami it was good there at La 72, there was medicine, balls for playing with other niños. Mami said, no, you must continue to El Norte where gangs and drug lords had less power. Where they could not make Mami do something on her knees with her mouth in Guatemala for a coyote deputy who held a knife. She turned her body to prevent you from seeing. Mami will never talk about this but if you become a good man, you will know her pain. She told you standing still was death, so she made you keep walking those many weeks when you did not ride atop La Bestia, the freight train whose tracks run up Mexico’s spine. Since El Norte’s government increased its pressures, Mexican authorities forbade migrants to ride on the train’s roof anymore. You and Mami sometimes watched La Bestia lumber past. You helped Mami get back on her feet to follow a pathway beaten by walkers and leading north, always north. Sometimes, because Mami had paid the coyote fee and done the thing on her knees, you could take a bus. That’s when you and Mami dared to sleep.

 

While Mami holds your sweater out to you at the doorway in Kincaid’s office, while she tells you, “Vente, vente rápido,” he says, “Not so fast.” He takes the backpack and sweater away from Mami and puts them on the desk of the man who got the call about missing cattle. Officer Kincaid puts Mami’s file on top of her backpack and your sweater. He stops Mami’s readiness to fight. “We’ll secure these things, señora.”

You move to join Mami, but Officer Kincaid blocks your way. As though he is doing something he has never done before, he once again looks down at the crown of your head where your hair swirls, growing longer after the haircut at La 72.

The man who answered the phone about missing cattle rises to grasp Mami’s elbow. “This way please, señora. Pasa, por favor.” He gestures for her to walk through the doorway with him.

Mami’s face is hard as she extends her arm toward you. “Vente,” she says.

The cattle man says, “No, just you, señora. This way, please,” and Officer Kincaid stamps large hands on your shoulders.

“Qué? Qué, qué?” Mami hurls her question from man to man. There is no mistake. Like a jackal, the one who answered the phone grips her upper arm. A mercenary’s grip. Her shoulders strain.

You squirm under Officer Kincaid’s hands the way you squirmed when the coyote touched your peepee, by mistake, he said.

You twist your neck up to address Officer Kincaid. “Mi madre. You no touch my mother.” Pull words from your store of Anglo. Do it. “She is mi madre. My mother.” He looks away.

“We’re going to give your kid a bath,” jackal man says. His smile is full of teeth. “Un baño para tu hijo, señora, y después, juntos.” He says you will be together with Mami after this bath.

You don’t want a bath. Who will bathe you? Another man like the coyote who gave too many baths to kids?

“No. Señores, no!” Mami tries to break away from the jackal. He twists her arm.

Officer Kincaid is sharp, “Watch it with her.” The jackal relents slightly.  

“Mi hijo? Mi hijo!” The jackal pulls hard, and Mami summons her voice into a whirlwind, “Hijo mío!” Her eyes on your eyes are deep as dirt. “No tenga miedo. Que Dios te guarde.” She wills God to guard you against fear as the jackal shuts the door, erasing her from your sight.

You hear yourself whisper, “Mami. Mami.” Never during these two months of walking and taking buses had you and Mami lost one another, you were very careful not to, my boy, because that could mean catastrophe, yet you are losing each other here, where children scream down hallways “Papi” or “Abuelo” or another beloved name. Their tears are an arroyuelo, a rivulet gathering into a rush of sorrow. You blocked the cries out before, my little buzzcut, when sky and earth and air around you whooshed together into this single office room, into a pinpoint between you, Mami, Officer Kincaid, and the man who answered the phone about missing cattle. Now you hear.

“Mi madre! Donde está mi madre?” Through walls. In your eardrums. Vibrating your fingertips as you try to pry Officer Kincaid’s hands off your shoulders.

“We won’t hurt her,” he says. “We won’t hurt you either. Está bien.” The flat yanqui desert of his voice. You don’t believe him. You want to spit at his skin, but you know better. You remember cigarette burns on the wrists of jóvenes, youngsters who misbehaved along the migratory route.

You say instead, “You lie, señor oficial,” and you feel the pressure of his hands change, almost obscenely, as though he wants to embrace you, something you know you will fight with your entire five-year-old body. You are your beautiful, defiant Mami’s sole caballero, and you will be strong.

The jackal walks back into the room. He says, “I handed her off,” then laughing, “These kids must sure miss their coyotes.”

“They call their coyotes ‘Mommy’?” Officer Kincaid says, challenging the jackal, making him cower like the inferior employee he is. Kincaid’s hands are still on your shoulders.

“Guess not,” cattle man says reluctantly, though his face claims the children are lying.

“Then shut up,” Officer Kincaid says and from below you see water in his eyes again. Not very manly, you think. Then you know that, for a moment, he would be your father if he could. This shocks you. He could never be Papi.

 

You cannot remember Papi’s face. Mami says M-13 killed him when you were not yet four years old. Since then you have asked over and over, “Does that man look like Papi? That man? Is that what he looked like?” You do not dare ask how Mami is pregnant, or you know how because you’ve heard older boys talk about it, even if you don’t know who is responsible. Months ago you overheard me cry for Mami, holding her tight, whispering “violada.” When the gang burned down our family’s small tienda where we passed soda cans for cash through barred windows, when they ransacked our house and slashed all our photos, I told Mami, “It’s time, querida. I’m old. You go. Take your son with you.” For the coyote’s fee, I gave you and Mami all the money I had hidden away. Then, near Reynosa, the coyote snatched the cross from around Mami’s neck. Papi was not there to protect her. Only you.

 

Beyond the closed door, down the Border Patrol Station’s hallway, you hear Mami’s voice shout, “No me toca!” then a thump and something falling onto the floor, then her voice again for the gringos not to touch her. Then slamming doors. You want to fight. You would kill to save her. But you are small, chico, and I am insubstantial. Reserve your strength.

Officer Kincaid steers you toward another door. This pulls you further away from Mami and from your sweater on the jackal’s desk. The jackal stuffs it into Mami’s backpack, which he places with her file on a side table. He taps numbers from her file folder into his computer. You look back. Your file is still on Officer Kincaid’s desk. It has no numbers.

Mami has numbers and you do not. You know this is important, boy, yet you are powerless to do anything about it as Officer Kincaid walks you through a doorway different from the one Mami went through, and down a hall. His hand is an anvil on your left shoulder. You want to run and scream because he and the jackal have drilled a hole in your chest, they have hurt your mami, and you know, despite water in his eyes, Officer Kincaid is not honorable, even though he desires to be, which I know and am telling you, child. This man’s soul is confused. Remember always, for the rest of your life, that at this moment, you are wiser than he is.

Wiser, querido niño, though your stomach shudders with sobs. You ask, “Cuando? When can I see mi madre?” and Officer Kincaid says, “Soon,” and you say, “You hurt mi madre, hombre. Por qué? Why?”

“Something just fell off a desk, kid. We didn’t hurt her. You’ll see her soon.”

And you arrive at the place where they will keep you. You have emerged into a cavernous space in which there has been constructed a large cage with dozens and dozens of other children in it. The walls are made from metal fencing similar to that around factories near the migratory route. Bright lights shine overhead, mats lie on the cement floor for sleeping, and along the edges, there are some benches on which to sit. Nothing else. A place for waiting. Chico, Officer Kincaid helped build these echoing military warehouses for children of “scrub walkers,” like you and Mami, who arrived from brushlands south of McAllen. Separate them. Make them sorry so they don’t come back. Orders from políticos. Kincaid followed these orders.

The other jóvenes turn to you. Their eyes tell you they know, and now you know, you will not see Mami soon. You do not explode in screams. You are growing up rapidly.

“No me toca,” you say to Officer Kincaid. Good. You are five years old. You move his hand off your shoulder.

 

*     *     *

 

I will tell you because I can see what you cannot, chico, that it is even hotter when Officer Kincaid goes outside for a break. He is trying not to think about who he has become.

He sits at a picnic table shaded by mountain laurel. Through purple blooms he sees a bus in the circular driveway. The bus will take passengers to nearby courts, he is sure. He imagines men and women corralled into courtrooms, given ten minutes with an attorney holding many creased files, then given their penalty all together before exhausted judges. Justice by the dozen, he thinks, better than what El Lobito’s deputies inflict on customers who do not pay.

Officer Kincaid spots a face through the bus window. Not El Lobito, el coyote notorio, but someone, someone. Kincaid rifles through his mind to identify this man’s features. He almost runs to the bus to stop this someone from slipping away amid unshaven travelers who might have paid for salvation in vain. The bus departs. He stays at his picnic table.

He was once convinced he was a protector, chico. You cannot believe this now. Believe instead that someday you will remember with pity, perhaps with contempt, that Officer Kincaid thought he was a soldier for good.

 

When his work still felt honorable. Two years ago, when rancher Lenhardt’s father called him to Route 77 north of McAllen.

Isaiah Menchú Aguilar had become a teenage corpse lying among dunes and yellow catclaw. Walking toward his ranch’s cattle fences, el viejo Lenhardt said he could forget many things from military service in Korea, yet not this teenager’s soul drying in the sun. The old man said his wife gave water to thirsty migrants who wandered onto their property, and extra rosaries as well. He said many died anyway, unnamed, buried under metal plates marked “Unknown Male” or “Unknown Female” with numbers following. Numbers for a bendición.

Lenhardt asked Officer Kincaid, Why? Why did American boys die in Asia for a country where youngsters perished this way, where Lenhardt himself, an Anglo by birth, had spoken so much Spanish in Texas as a child, he failed English at school?

Isaiah was thirteen, muerto under a mesquite tree in south Texas’s wilderness known to us, chico, as Desierto de los Muertos, Desert of the Dead. Officer Kincaid made notes. Isaiah’s face was soft and long, teenage hair to his shoulders, eyelashes straight, head resting on his backpack. He had his mami’s phone number written inside his shirt with a permanent pen. When Officer Kincaid returned to the McAllen station, he called Señora Aguilar in Honduras and immediately she grasped the wasting dry mockery. She’d paid El Lobito her life savings to deliver her boy to safety. Instead, the jefe abandoned him, desecrating the blessing she had labored into this world. Even before she wailed, Officer Kincaid joined her in hating El Lobito.

Little wolf-man, five feet six inches, who charged a campesino’s fortune to smuggle nephews inside washing machines on scalding truck beds, or a husband stuffed into an engine block, almost shrieking in desperation to breathe without betraying himself. Losing his mind when El Lobito’s goons closed the hood and he could not move his flesh against the engine or inhale or cry out that this was too much, his brain was frying itself with terror, he could not lift his head from this hardness of death oppressing him, a metal coffin, no room to move his nose, his eyelids, no air, the devil remorselessly sucking his burning lungs. Air, air, just one more breath, a red dot in this man’s mind before he died of heat in that engine block. Officer Kincaid’s work was once his promise to open the hood.

Or so he tells himself. Yet he does not pursue cartel jefes nowadays. He rarely takes Border Patrol’s drug-sniffing dog outside its air-conditioned kennel. He has time only for pulling hope apart like the flesh of a stringy cooked rooster, as he did with you and Mami. He has less time for recording details of this shredded hope, though he tries, even when the jackal laughs at him, telling him not to bother, these people will be deported anyway and Jordan’s voice withers the other man, “You know that, huh?”

 

He takes a Pepto-Bismol tablet from his breast pocket and chews it. Pink dryness puffs out of his mouth.

 

*     *     *

 

            I am following Officer Kincaid home, my boy. I’m listening to his words and what is around him, to what is in his heart, so I can tell you and prepare you to make choices when your mind is ready.

Meanwhile, rest. Take the Mylar blanket that resembles tin foil and nap under a high metal ceiling. You have tried to count how many footsteps you must take to reach your mat from the bench along edges of this grand cage. Uno, dos, tres, you lose track. You have not practiced counting very much because you are five years old and do not yet count beyond ten. You want to lay your head on my soft breasts at the moment before sleep, to hear love’s promise in my breathing. In and out, so steady. Which must resemble the breath of norteño parents, though this thing is done to you in their names.

Since your floor mat has a plastic cover, you cannot find softness unless you use the palms of your hands as pillows for your nap. Tears come into your throat. You try to choke them away with anger until sobs betray you. You long for something warm to drink and you long to be a man at the same time. Your little tummy is empty, querido, how can they treat children this way. You think of Mami, and your mind cannot go beyond the scent of her hair and the question, Why.

You cannot sleep because desert sweat freezes on your skin, doesn’t it. So cold. Your cyclone-fence room looks like a refrigerator with badly covered leftovers, chico, crinkled norteño tin foil scattered all over, except there is no food underneath. Only children’s bodies. Yes, it is chilly, so place that toilet paper ration they gave you onto the cement floor as a cushion. It will have to be enough. This is the hielera, the ice box, as they will call it along final miles of the migratory route, where whispers are the only news.

While you are lying down, a girl next to you repeats and repeats her tía’s phone number, which her mami told her to memorize. You say hola. The girl says her name is Asunción. She wears a green T-shirt with glittery letters and sits on her mat whispering, skinny and frightened. She does not respond when you say hola again in your voice that is as high as hers, high as Mayan clay flutes. Asunción’s pigtails have become messy and matted. She has chewed her lower lip raw. But she is one year older than you, and she has been entrusted with phone numbers. I hear you thinking that maybe your age is why you have not been told to memorize any phone numbers. Or maybe it is because there are no phone numbers left in your familia to memorize. You cannot change this, boy.

You must try not to cry for Mami. You are mastering your hurt. This will be necessary for you in El Norte. Dream of yanqui Star Wars and magic silver blankets. While you do, I will visit Officer Kincaid and his family, then whisper what I learn into the depths of your sleep. Understand it when you can. Decide whether you will accept it.

And let us hope these norteños turn out the massive lights above at bedtime tonight. While teenagers laugh along the benches of purgatory’s gymnasium.

 

*     *     *

 

“Did you start the coals?”

Jordan Kincaid’s wife Lurene calls to him while she chops cucumbers in the kitchen. Fat around her throat tightens her breath. This makes it difficult for her husband to want to touch her, she thinks. She once lit his passion. No more. He is now forty-one years old and Señora Kincaid knows his fire burns underground.

            She has people coming over for a fiesta this Memorial Day. Five, including the son of the diamond-cross woman Jordan let go without a speeding ticket those years ago. Lurene has heard this woman announce that Jordan is a hero. For his civility. What a decent young man, about the age of her own son, who works in produce import. While Jordan protects our nation, the woman says.

“Soon,” he calls from his home office alcove. After his work with you and Mami, my boy, he does not want to think about what he protected this morning. Luckily, he is excused from the Border Patrol Station for the rest of Memorial Day. He expects he’ll soon put on an apron and cook at his backyard’s outdoor grill in Pharr. His town is next to McAllen and is connected by bridge to Mexico and Reynosa’s factories and produce and prosperous trucking fleets with which the diamond-cross woman’s son does business. Jordan lives among people whose steps cross the border every day, chico, who slide from English to Spanish as easily as ordering two eggs over, sin tortillas, at Marena’s breakfast place.

 Jordan’s work alcove is not magnificent. It was once a large closet near the washing machine, which is next to the kitchen, which connects to everything else in this low brick home where son Matthew does homework his escuela gives twelve-year-olds. You have not attended school yet, little buzzcut. You would envy him. Matthew often sneaks into his bedroom and plays war games on TV, and this too would arouse your envy. Matthew’s cuarto is next to his brother Aden’s cuarto. Both cuartos are smaller than their parents’ bedroom, which is modest. Hijito, Kincaid’s house might disappoint you. It is not the grand American palace depicted by telenovelas on our neighbor’s battered TV in Guatemala City.

Understand also, Aden’s bedroom is empty. Matthew plays war games alone.

            “Isn’t it early for the coals, anyway?” Jordan calls without telling Lurene he is busy trying to track you, chico, in the small notebook he has kept separate from the Border Patrol Station, where computers overburdened with migrant information stop working sometimes. Agents are told to write things down, keep them in a safe place, Jordan recalls. Yet he cannot find you. He assigned you a file number at Border Patrol, he is sure. Then he is not sure.

            “Early? It’s three o’clock, Jordan. They’re coming at five,” Lurene shouts.

“Okay. In a minute. Almost done here.”

Jordan turns on his desk lamp over family photos. Red-headed Lurene before she started eating to bury her grief, freckle-spotted Matthew, narrow-faced Aden with brown eyes and hair and straight lashes. He adjusts Aden’s photo so that Aden seems to ask from the frame, “Can you find me?”

Jordan concentrates badly. Air-conditioned cool coils around his feet. He pulls on socks even though outside, Pharr is now hot as a frying pan. Meanwhile Lurene has not lost any fat. This is what he cannot help thinking about his wife as he stares at his notebook. Hombre, he tells himself, she was once something else.

 

Until she started eating last year after Matthew’s younger brother Aden died – he was only ten years old – while riding his bicycle. Jordan did not know the elderly man who was backing out of his driveway and didn’t see Aden shoot across. Aden was dead immediately, little pieces of spine showing like knuckles through the back of his neck. The man who killed him had no record of bad driving. Jordan vomited that night, thinking about which nice police officer had let the man go with a warning.

Jordan burned with rage during days when he and Lurene picked out a white casket for Aden. Norteños wait longer after death than we do, chico, for caskets from a factory, not hand-made by friends. Jordan hated Aden’s short, dusty grave. He had no desire to visit it later. Or write wishes to his departed son, as we do. He refused to communicate across death’s boundary because he was convinced it was real and he did not believe there was anyone listening on the other side anyway. When Aden died, he and Lurene did not even try to paint bright prayers for Aden onto death’s darkness. They let a Baptist padre do it. While the padre spoke, Jordan felt his heart split. He felt Lurene’s spirit turn away. He was too afraid to whisper, “My Lurene.”

His querida, red-headed and brown-eyed. Lurene’s ponytail once barely contained her abundant, curly hair. On her lower lip, she had one dark mole, which she emphasized when they were teenagers. It was sexy, erótico. At the cemetery, Jordan almost could not bear to recall her tiny, gymnastic breasts, her small tetas and strong, shapely legs, her excellent grades, better than his. How she survived her youth on courage and recklessness because her widowed father was away demasiado, too much on the road, driving a truck to make good money. How she laughed the night she married Jordan, when she told him that because she was the family’s youngest, she had made her sisters shriek when she drove nail holes into the next door garden hose to soak the neighbor’s hairdo, her peinado, after her beauty parlor appointment. How once Lurene graduated from high school she wanted only a familia in which she commanded a clean house and the father came home every day. After their wedding, long before the cemetery, Jordan anticipated an unbroken string of sensual nights. Lurene was once powerful, chico. Wild because she was lonely.

 

Sitting in his home office on Memorial Day, Jordan doesn’t think of his wife that way anymore. He realized long ago that she must know it. He covers his face with his hands. He has not embraced her in weeks.

She is now quiet in the kitchen. As quiet as she is about his work, which she refuses to speak about. He pictures her finishing a quart of ice cream with chocolate swirls, trying to create a pregnancy of excess food to replace their Aden, to mimic a false niño in her belly. Hiding ice cream in the back of the freezer, a stainless steel hielera with refrigerator and produce bins below. Filling herself with baby delusion, her face puffy and the mole on her lip growing a hair. Jordan has seen her try to pry the hair out in front of the bathroom mirror. These efforts only created a wound.

At his desk, Jordan kisses Aden’s photo and turns off his desk lamp. Acid heats his bowels. He eats a Pepto-Bismol and rolls his office chair backwards so he can stand.

            “Jordan. The coals.” Lurene coughs.

            “Yep. Right away.” He walks into the kitchen pantry and grabs his grilling tools. He tells himself he will take Lurene into his arms this evening.

 

            When Jordan and Lurene lie in their bed tonight, chico, there will be two mounds under blue and white striped sheets, one long, one large and short, about the size of Aden’s grave. Jordan’s arm will lie across the larger mound, which will shake as Lurene cries. He will apologize and soothe, shhhh.

            “I’m sorry, babe,” he will say. “It’s me, not you.”

            “Cut the crap, Jordan. I’m disgusting.”

            The window air conditioner will hum, then growl and smell burnt, then hum again. Jordan and his wife, safe in their flesh, never feel cold in this bedroom hielera, little buzzcut, as you would.

“No, babe,” he says, “you’re not disgusting.”

            “Don’t touch me, Jordan,” she says. “I can’t stand it.” She turns over, away from him. He reaches under the wrinkled sheet toward her broad haunch. “Don’t fake it,” she says, and pulls his hand near her stomach, keeps him close, a giant’s spoon around her back. “Don’t do anything. Just hold me.” She has brushed her teeth. They smell of mint. Her hair is wet and smells of lavender shampoo at the spot where a curl clings to her neck. Her enormous flesh smells like porridge and, because it is nighttime, whiskey. Her sorrow collapses Jordan’s stomach.

            “I miss Aden,” he says, his voice cracking open an arroyo far away, yet close enough to echo: Guess where I am.

            Just as your mami did when I called her “violada,” Lurene squeezes breath through her throat, and cries out, “Ahhhh.” She says, “it hurts so bad, Jordan.”

            “Me too, babe. Me too.”

            There is a silence full as a communion chalice.

            “He wasn’t yours, Jordan.”

            Officer Kincaid’s blood tells him to rise, punch his fist through the bedroom’s dry wall, rip Lurene by the hair and stuff her head into the hole, then push, push, until her fat body wedges and quivers with farts and terror.

“You were chasing crooks and I never saw you. I lost you. Matthew lost you.”

            His massive arm could kill her.

            “I hated you. I hated your Spanish. All those years you couldn’t learn fucking Spanish.” She kicks backwards, hits his legs, while clamping his arm around her.

            He decides. He turns his head and lets his body go soft.

            “Forgive me,” Jordan says to something above, as though he sees me watching, his voice thin as ceiling paint. Then he says, “I knew about Aden. He was ours anyway, babe.”

            “I hate you so much,” Lurene says, her arm stroking Jordan’s arm.

            While Jordan cries hard into the hair of his once-beautiful wife, I feel the moon’s fingers pass through me, hijo, as they invade the bedroom through a gap in the window curtains. The moon wants to see how this mother and father will survive separation from their child. How they will live through its permanence. The moon’s white face waits outside, then pulls away across the bridge that will separate me from you.

           

Jordan Kincaid must hurt, hijo. If he hurts enough, he may try to save himself. Be cautious.

 

*     *     *

 

On the evening they order a large group of you onto a bus to an airport and a plane to Nueva York, you will grab the water bottle they gave you and break and run and skitter and hide yourself, small under the brush outside the processing center. With a child’s reckless courage, you will intend to hide within deep shadows in culverts no taller than an agent’s knee. Dryness at the culvert floor will smell faintly rotten. You will be determined to sneak back into where they took Mami. To find her and comfort her. You will imagine her arms enfolding you, her cries and her body next to yours. How you will both find comfort in the fragrance of her ears as she presses her head against yours. You will know eventually, when you reach the age of reason, that Mami was raped in Guatemala on El Lobito’s orders and again along the route for good measure. She must give birth here in a Texas detention facility. You will believe you can handle all this knowledge if you and Mami are together.

 

I’ll stay with you as long as I am allowed. Understand I cannot protect you forever this way, my boy. The day El Lobito’s lieutenants discovered you and Mami had fled Lomas de Santa Faz, they sent me to my saints. I must complete that journey soon. Watch carefully for your chance to escape the hielera. Then run among lizards and rocks. Run, child.

 

Officer Kincaid will be looking for you, my little buzzcut. He will no longer wonder why Aden’s hair was so dark, no longer wonder about the fidelity of his wife, that wild, brilliant, limited woman who chose something that never satisfied her, and he will not care because he knows he is at fault and his knowing will release him. He will see his Aden in the crown of your head. He will see Mami under Lurene’s grief. He will believe he must save you, that he is capable. He will mistake his own rescue for another’s.

 

Desierto de los Muertos dries his eyes, young one. He looks for you.

Rio Grande drenches him while he searches. Sudden rare rain inhibits his progress. He advances.

A horse more agile than his Border Patrol SUV along riverbanks picks up traces, imprints of your hands and knees where you fell in the mud, boy. They help him find you.

He lifts you, alive, into a cloth blanket and encircles your wrist with a hospital bracelet to keep track this time. He closes your hand around the bits of glitter and bright strands of pigtail yarn Asunción gave you. Rain runs off Kincaid’s duckbill cap onto his nose and into his red eyes.

He whispers that he will find Mami.

He has his resignation letter prepared and perhaps Lurene will leave him anyway, taking Matthew with her. They have very little money.

He believes he has undergone a miracle.

You, my darling, will be like a small animal that has burrowed under roots to stay warm in a downpour, deciding whether to trust a light laid upon the ground, its beam streaking upward.